


Icarus in the Underworld

by DeCarabas



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: F/M, Gen, Jealousy, Pre-Canon, Yuletide Treat, outsider pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:42:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28271100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: Why is it so hot down here? Why is it so bright down here? It ain't right and it ain't natural.On building a foundry in the underground.
Relationships: Hades/Persephone (Hadestown)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 36
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Icarus in the Underworld

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AceQueenKing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/gifts).



When the boss brings his wife home that first time and the two of them step off the train all wrapped up in each other, the train carries with it a breeze of life and summertime that curls through the air just for a moment, just long enough to brush against a worker’s skin and tease his mind with old memories before it’s gone. A breath of fresh air quickly gets swallowed up in the heavy earth of the underground. The boss slings a fur coat around his wife and tucks it tight, and she smiles even as she shivers like the cold down here just gives her an excuse to hold him tighter, and the worker averts his eyes. 

They don’t look at the new arrivals, that’s the unspoken rule, and they don’t talk to them, and she may be the boss’s wife but that rule still applies. Give it a while and she’s going to be as wrung out and worn out as everybody else down here, just as haunted-looking as she picks her way around the underground by lantern light. Better not to try to look at the sun while it’s shining.

* * *

It might have been months, it might have been years, it might have been centuries after that when the worker is pulled out of the mines and called into Hades’s office to head up the new project. The boss’s wife is away again at the time, he knows that much. The whole underground’s gone colder and darker in her absence, particularly wherever the boss is. 

“Got a job for you,” Hades says. He calls the worker _Daedalus’s boy, right,_ a name the worker hasn’t heard since he can’t remember when, and _the great inventor._ “My girl wants to walk in the sun? That’s just fine. We’re going to give her the sun.” 

Proud of himself, smug with it. The boss looks almost human sometimes, when he talks about her.

* * *

The worker’s hours in the mines are replaced by hours bogged down in paperwork, charts, numbers, measurements, head overfull with static exhaustion by the end of his shift, trying to recapture something lost and forgotten, the kind of brightness and warmth that makes a person want to fly into it.

And the train carries a trail of snow with it by the time the boss’s wife gets back that year, late. And the boss disappears with her into a potted garden under a new string of greenhouse lights, the decadence of chrysanthemums flowering after the snows, life in the underground just for her. Though the light's not enough to hold those chrysanthemums upright, stems slumping over until they turn into dangling vines, still, the flowers on those vines are willing to bloom in December. And the boss floats through the underground as happy as the day he first brought her home.

And Persephone trails her fingers over the walls of her garden room, and she sings to the plants in their pots, and she sings to her man who is just a man when she’s around, almost human. They say the sun burns twice as bright when Persephone’s above ground out of love for her, but there’s laughter in the mines when she’s below.

She still flies away again in the spring.

When the worker reports to the boss’s office, he finds Hades sitting behind his desk with his head in his palms. But that’s another thing the workers don’t look at directly. He knocks at the doorframe, and the boss straightens, and the boss rolls out the newest update to the blueprints. The greenhouse wasn’t bright enough. It wasn’t hot enough. But it was just the start.

* * *

The boss’s wife hangs out at the bar offering a sip of moonshine, or sunshine, whatever it is that tugs at the worker’s memories of wax wings and buried desires as she asks anyone and everyone, _when was the last time you saw the sky?_

Too long, however long it’s been. Long enough that he can’t deliver whatever it is the boss is looking for, anyway. Because whenever Persephone steps off that train and sees his foundry and his power grid and his lights so bright that the boss has taken to covering his eyes behind dark glasses at the entrance to his own kingdom, she pulls a face. Complains about the brightness, about the heat. It ain’t natural, she says. 

And that almost-human look on the boss’s face disappears behind cold disappointment, and he’s just their boss again, the change coming over him as heavy as another brick in the wall slotting into place. 

Hades starts wondering out loud why he keeps Icarus around, why he bothers with people who’d fly into the sun if they could. 

And when the worker accepts the glass of liquid sunshine that Persephone’s handing out at the bar, it comes with a heavy side of resentment of his own designs. She talks about the old underground, before the bright, hot foundry, before the light and the heat and the noise that he’s spent these years mapping out and building as the boss’s gift to her. The days when she could just sink into the dark earth and forget her troubles. 

“Let the underground be the underground,” she says to him as she raises a glass. “Let the sun be the sun.”

But even so, Hades still summons him back into the office to go over the newest round of improvements to the foundry, to the power grid. It could be bigger. Brighter. More efficient. They could light it up until they’ve chased out every shadow from every dark corner of the underground.

* * *

It’s a tall order, trying to compete with the sun. Never hot enough. Never bright enough. Never capturing that memory of flying through the open air and reaching for something he couldn’t hold onto, the way the boss’s wife reaches for whatever’s beyond that train, the way the boss reaches for her.

But the boss asks them for the impossible and the boss is jealous of the sun, and the workers know it, and they keep their heads down and do the impossible anyway.


End file.
